1776 I've been propositioned

A librarian found my blog about my hobby, collecting premiere issues of magazines. He wants me to sell one of them so he can complete that library's run of a particular serial title. Having incomplete serial holdings creates a lot of angst and sleepless nights for librarians. They are like drug sniffing dogs. I know I was.

I used to run a pretty good veterinary replacement title service out of my office. We vet librarians would put our list of extras on our listserv and offer them to other libraries. We had a thousand extra JAVMA's, but not so many Dairy Goat Journals. Our method of exchange was postage stamps. If it cost $4.50 to send them, then that librarian would send you $4.50 in postage stamps. You never actually used your stamps for postage--just used them as barter. Some of these stamps in really odd denominations had been around the world several times.

One day in 1995 someone left a sheet of Marilyn Monroe postage stamps in the copy machine. No one ever came back to claim them. (I used to find divorce papers, lab tests, medical records, and love letters in the copy machine.) I put them in the stamp box, but never used them. I suspected they'd never come home in the exchanges. That 32 cent stamp issued in 1995 is the 12th most popular stamp ever issued by the USPS, earning it $15,000,000 from 46,000,000 stamps sold. If I'd been smart, I would have just replaced them with the same amount in ordinary postage stamps. But in 1995, they were just worth 32 cents--$6.40. Or, I'm too honest for my own good.

I'm still thinking about that guy's offer.